1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a programmable device for issuing reminder signals, in particular for issuing an alert signal to remind the user to perform a recurring act.
2. Description of the Related Art
In healthcare, making sure patients take the right medication at the right time is a major challenge. Many people are struggling to comply with their medical prescription, especially when multiple types of medications should be taken with different patterns of intake times. Especially for the elderly, who often suffer a degrading short-term memory and easily forget whether or not they already took their medication, this is a serious problem. Since especially the elderly often need to take multiple types of medication with different intake patterns, errors in proper administration are hard to avoid.
There are many concepts and devices to assist with patient medication compliance and/or other health related factors. However, these devices lack the combination of being low-cost, easy to use and having a rich feature set. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,289 discloses a programmable prescription compliance device, but suffers from several shortcomings:                it has a limited choice in dosing schedules (supports only commonly prescribed medication taking regimens);        the functionality of the computer interface is limited to the use of an external device (e.g. PC) to select and program one of the supported regimens, and cannot be used to create an alternative regimen;        it is not designed to handle the problem of a disturbed medication intake schedule when users travel to another time zone while taking medications;        the intake times are calculated based on only three factors (first intake time, interval between doses, and acceptable time range to take the medication) and thus provides no support for patients that have an irregular lifestyle and yet need to take their medication at a specific period before or after their meals;        it has no means to automatically recalculate a next intake time to prevent a dose that is too low or too high in case of the patient taking medication too early or too late; and        it is not designed to support alternative uses and applications.        
Accordingly, there is a need for a personal event reminder device without these shortcomings.